How Rock Content’s Global Talent Created a Playstation Interactive Story for WIPO

In late 2019, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), reached out to Rock Content with the goal of increasing their brand awareness in North America.

This was at the onset of a worsening global pandemic that forced businesses and employees to reevaluate the meaning of remote work policies, with countries such as Australia, France, and the UK having around 47% of their population working remotely.

The usual in-person meetings and brainstorming sessions for big projects were increasingly being replaced by conference calls – save for the few of us who have already been living in this remote work paradigm.

However, this was already our reality at Rock Content. As a global company with teams distributed in 17 countries, we have been making complex content projects for many of our enterprise clients remotely. We have had years of experience in leveraging our highly vetted Global Talent Network and sizable productions in a qualitative manner.

Rock Content’s Sr. Manager of Talent Manager, Liz Vickers, who strongly believes in the power of remote talent said to me in one of our conversations that “freelancers empower companies to be agile, adapt to market needs real-time, and seize growth opportunities that may be otherwise out of reach.”

This new challenge WIPO had brought to the table was familiar, we felt at home and were ready to deliver in a global and remote mindset. Their intent was to create a digital story that outlines how intellectual property laws shaped the first Playstation console launch in Japan, 1994.

The WIPO team wanted something unique, new, and visually striking. Being a gamer myself, I was naturally thrilled at the challenge and opportunity to work closely with WIPO’s team on and leverage visual assets approved by several legendary gaming companies such as Eidos and Square Enix.

As the producer I wanted to make sure I put together the best team possible that could help WIPO achieve their goals.

The assembled team

After ideating the general approach and structure of the parallax digital story, I thought we could use more creative flair and brought into the mix my years-long colleague, Nick Vaka, our own late-night showman (yes, he is the host of Rock Tonight. If you have not seen it yet, you should go there right now – and come back here later, of course!). 

Nick resides in Virginia, USA, and being an experienced animator, producer, and creative director himself he assembled  a collage of images that would inspire the experience. The “Neo Tokyo” concepts were presented to the program manager, Donna Hill, who was at the forefront of the project on WIPO’s side.

Rock Content’s Global Talent Network executed the copyediting, illustration, web design and frontend development for the experience. Livia Giorgini (Brazil), managed the project through Visually, Rock’s proprietary platform for cloud-based production collaboration.

The content was based on a 10,000 word article written and researched by the legendary David Greenspan, author of “Mastering The Game: Business and Legal Issues for Video Game Developers”. With over 25 years experience working in business and legal affairs for some of the most significant video game publishers, David was uniquely qualified to tell the story of how the PlayStation’s IP came to be.

Jorge Ignacio Castillo (Vancouver, British Columbia) collaborated with Donna and David to adapt the content for a digital story. This was a major challenge given that David’s original article was extremely fact-rich and full of relevant information. This eventually paved the way for the design and development magic to happen on the visual end. 

Lisa Eyo (London, UK) was tasked with making the original creative direction and vision come to life. Designing her own marvelous illustrations and leveraging assets approved by gaming companies Donna worked closely with, she managed to deliver an eye-catching Neo Tokyo landscape spanning over a whopping 30 parallax/CSS animated screens. 

The frontend development was executed by BrainyYack (Toronto, Canada), who worked on the CSS, SVG, and JavaScript animations; bringing the Neo Tokyo landscape to life with a barrage of flickering lights, meteors, rocket launches, swinging samurai swords, and more. This talented team leveraged the following libraries and frameworks:

• HTML5
• JavaScript
• SCSS for compiled version of CSS
• Swiper library for scrolling effects and horizontal direction navigation
• Screenfull library for swapping screen to full screen mode
• Browser library to detect and apply specific settings depending on each browser (safari, chrome, firefox, IE)

After an extensive collaboration with WIPO, working through copy and design tweaks, asset research and approvals, and an involved development cycle, the experience is live and ready to view here.

Collaborative effort that brings results

Check out what WIPO’s Donna Hill, said about her experience collaborating with Rock Content:

“Rock Content obviously rocks !  The team we worked with to create the first in a series of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) initiative on creating interactive digital stories for a worldwide audience was exceptional.  The team listened patiently to our explanations on what we wanted to achieve and where we had doubts, they jumped in to ensure we could meet our main objective, which was to reach an audience that has no intellectual property knowledge and wanted to learn more.  We wish Rock Content continued success in their endeavors!” -Donna Hill, Program Manager at WIPO.

As you can see, the interactive experience was well received on the  first day of its launch and is well on its way to helping WIPO achieve its goals. Talent networks have the potential to achieve great things and this is one of many examples. 

Moreover, the power of connecting different cultures and languages can bring amazing and creative results. We brought  people together from the US, Canada, UK and Brazil. Each was working remotely, but were synchronized. This is the beauty of technology and collaboration that Rock Content believes and embraces.